♪ Let's begin together ♪ (hand slapping) - Cool.

(mellow keyboard music) My name is Savary Sav Hazard-Chaney.

I like to go by Sav, and I'm a fiber artist right here in Providence, Rhode Island.

(device clattering) I've never even taken an art class, and I had zero experience working with fibers or textiles.

I started painting, completely just out of interest and on my own and just being inspired by my blackness, queerness, culture, music, things like that.

I'm painting and recreating some really cool and dope art, but I'm using this tufting machine.

Growing up, being a creative was probably one of the last things that I thought I would ever grow up becoming.

I was pretty hell-bent on, you know, being one of the first girls in the NBA.

That was one of our, all famous dreams in the '90s.

I played a little bit of college ball, and then the joints and the knees and things like that really caught up with your girl.

And I just couldn't play the way that I wanted to play.

I was still connected in community, and I joined a few women's leagues around here just to be able to still move my body.

I'm realizing now that I really was missing the community that I had when I was playing, the teammates and the culture and the rhetoric that we have before and after the game.

I was in Warwick.

I was going to school at the time.

This was like prime pandemic period, and my family and I experienced a house fire.

That is sort of what shook and moved us then to Providence, and it was here that I really started exploring being an artist.

The art community here in Providence is remarkable.

It completely took me in when I didn't feel like I even had a place inside of it, and then it completely just hovered around me and helped me grow in this.

It really felt like my call and my mission to explore and figure out what it meant to build that community.

You're ready for you cut.

Yep, absolutely.

I didn't have any idea that I would be teaching when I first stepped out into community and started sharing my rugs.

People were like, "You should totally teach."

And I was like, "Yeah, I'm gonna teach."

It is okay if you go over.

I just don't need you to go hard over because.

I very loosely made a Instagram reel of a workshop that I had that I had a remarkable time at.

And go ahead and squeeze that button.

(device clattering) Yeah.

- Is that goin' up?

(audience cheering) - [Sav] And stop and pull the machine right out.

- Pull the machine out.

Oh, I like this.

- But I made this with a lot of love and a lot of adoration.

- And I love it.

I love it.

- I posted that reel, and next thing I know it had half a million views, and my workshops are sold-out for the first six months of the year.

And I was begging people to take this class a year ago.

You know what I mean?

So, there is just power in intuition, and when you're anointed you're anointed.

Just the idea of tufting in more of these spaces just keeps expanding.

And then, of course, the idea of what it means to make a rug also just continues to expand and grow.

And as the community grows, more cooler artists come out with even bigger and better ideas, and I feel like I got to have a piece of that.

(mellow keyboard music continues) I still like to consider myself a basketball girlie.

I'm learning that too.

Like, bein' an adult and then having like, coming into this beautiful relationship and having children come up right beside me.

I hope that I'm showing them like what it means to follow something they really love to do.

- You're back is really sweaty.

(Sav laughing) - There's so much about my childhood that I just miss or wish I just I got to spend more time on, and so I think this is also homage to little Sav in just making sure that she's good, and she feels good and she's being taken care of now because that's also a really important piece of this.

(mellow jazz music) (static crackling)